Norse and Old English have a grammatical feature known as Kenning.

The closest thing in modern English to Kenning is perhaps "portmanteau".
Its literal meaning in french is ‘carry-cloak’ but translates from the English usages as Luggage or Suitcase, something that holds things.

A Portmanteau inherently has an understanding that two words are packed inside.

Mockumentary, Sitcom, Pokémon, all come to mind.

As do shepherd (sheep herder) squander, (scatter and wander), podcast, (iPod + broadcast) or the humble cronut.

As a consequence of the enlightenment English began to favor literalism.

To pin ideas to words like butterflies on a cork board and describe the whole world. There’s a reason there’s more than half a million words in the English language dictionary.

English reaches for words with other words packed inside to describe something new by their combination.

Often these new words utterly fail to convey the actual meaning of the thing they try to describe.

Metaphor like “Her eyes were glistening jewels” tries to correct for this, as does analogy. But both portmanteau and metaphor fail in my estimate to produce new meaning.

Kenning on the other hand is a figure of speech or ambage of two words that circle around an idea. Using multiple words rather than envoking it or describing it directly.

A Kenning is a compound that employs figurative language in place of a more concrete single-word noun.

Kennings create meaning, and require thoughtful interpretation in a way that is almost unthinkable in day to day english.

For example the word "Hronrad" as found in Beowulf.

Hron means “whale.” Rad means “a road,” or “a path.”

Put them together, … and you get hronrad, or “whale-road,” which means “the sea.”

The ocean is not an empty space, hronrad says — it belongs to the whale. Human beings crisscross it on our adventures, but when we do it, we are trespassing on a very large mystery.

Some kennings have survived through time. We use them without thinking.

The ideas contained within their orbits are fixed in culture. So we require little to no work to decipher their meaning.

New Kennings do still crop up every now and then. For example a Cancer Stick isn’t a metaphor, it’s two words in orbit of an idea. As is Couch Potato, Gas Guzzler, or Land Line.

Using the words Land + Line to refer to the telephone socket is wonderful. Two words in an elegant orbit that produce a conceptual place holder. Rather than a description.

Some old Kennings hold complex concepts and powerful meaning inside. For example a “weather of weapons” means a war. “A Storm of Swords” is an Anglo Saxon Kenning for Battle.

The coherence of the words in orbit of one another produce more meaning by their dance than using a single one. I have never been to war or a battle. But Weather of Weapons gives me a better emotional understanding of what it might be like, than the single word alone.

Some of you are probably thinking of the concept of Twisted Language of the Yaminahua Shamen of Peru.

Twisted language brings us close but not too close – with normal words you crash into things – with twisted ones you circle around them – you can see them clearly.

kennings are deliberately constructed in an elliptical and multi-referential fashion so as to mirror the refractory nature of the beings who are their objects.

When I was studying philosophy at University I had a lecturer who was a big fan of Red Wine, Wittgenstein and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. A book full of digressions, interruptions and stories-within-stories.

In one of our lectures the conversation had been going round and around. About literally everything other than the subject of the we were supposed to be studying. With a growing detectable frustration from the more direct students in the room. They felt we were wasting time.

He explained by discussing everything and anything ‘around’ the topic; we had out of the corner of our eyes begun to glimpse the true nature of the subject.

The subject had very much been at hand. It had dominated the entire topic of our conversation by its omission.

A giant hole in the conversation, the blind men touching the elephant in the room as it were.

By not addressing the subject directly we had collectively found its edges and its gravity.

The gravity of a kenning indicates the intensity of the concept it tries to contain.

Orbits, gyroscopes, gyers bring to mind angular velocity that acrete around a star or an idea.

We need more kennings, to dance around the edges of ideas to generate more understanding.

Reject the literalism that flattens ideas with labels or name.